The Hold Steady

Heaven Is Whenever, the new Hold Steady album, sounds very much like a Hold Steady album; nothing about it will shock you if you've been paying attention to the band's past four records and to the arc that they form. It has more big riffs, more bigger choruses, more dizzily worded images of youthful debauchery. But slowly, the band has incorporated new melodic ideas: slide guitars, jaunty Memphis horns, a clarinet solo. Frontman Craig Finn is actually singing sometimes these days, rather than splenetically ranting into the wind. And the band has moved from the outsider's in-quotes take on alcohol-fueled arena-rock to actual straight-up arena-rock, no quotes necessary. That's a big move.

Craig Finn: It's good! We had two weeks or so on the road with this new lineup, which was exciting and fun and different. We're all psyched. It's interjected new life into the thing.

Pitchfork: On this new album, you're really singing more than ever.

CF: We have been blessed in order to play music for a living for a long time, and through that we've played tons of shows. Being on a microphone nightly has made me better at what I do, made me better able to sing a little bit, but also more confident at trying it. So I think that that's part of where it comes from.

Pitchfork: You've also got these bigger choruses. I talked to you when Boys and Girls in America came out, and you said that you knew "Party Pit" would be a big live singalong song. Do you think about that with any of these ones? Or do you think about that while you're writing them?

CF: You can sort of tell. The second song's "Soft in the Center": "You can't get every girl; you get the ones you love the best." Those couplets-- you can kind of tell that there's a certain type of dude who's in our audience that you see his fist raised. It's not what I'd say I'm trying to do, or what I'm trying to say, but you can kind of think like, "Oh yeah, people are going to do a certain thing in that one."

Going back to "Party Pit", you can tell-- because that one's about drinking-- that people will have a certain reaction to it. But yeah, I think with the choruses, we did something we wanted to do. We wanted to create something that was memorable. It's our fifth record. It's really easy, in a band, to overstate-- you feel like everything you do is different than the past. I think this is just another Hold Steady record, but at the same time, there is some evolution. Like, "How can we make this chorus bigger?" "What do we want this to sound like?"

Pitchfork: There could be this one interesting contrast on the album. It's the most melodic and polished you've ever sounded, but you're also making more references to old hardcore bands.

CF: Some people I've talked to have had really an interpretation of this record as being nostalgic. But in some ways, when we were writing Stay Positive, I was really obsessed with age. I kept saying it was a record about trying to age gracefully. This record, I think actually was us aging gracefully. Some of the lyrics come from maybe a place of a little more wisdom, being 38 and at this point having a lifetime in rock'n'roll.

There's this old joke about a young bull looking down at these cows and saying, "Hey dad, look at all those cows! Let's run down and fuck one of them." And dad says, "No, let's walk down and fuck them all"-- which is a crass way of explaining what I'm trying to say. But there's this contentment. I don't feel like there's a chip on this shoulder anymore. I feel pretty content. I mean, things have been going pretty well for us for a while. So maybe the lyrics come from a slightly different place.

Pitchfork: So if the last one was a record about aging gracefully, what's this one about?

CF: I think this record's really about struggle and reward. You know, the point of being in a band, for instance, isn't to get big; it's about enjoying playing shows. It's like when you go to the gym. You can either go to the gym because you want to lose weight, or you can go to the gym because you like how it makes you feel when you're running. So I think this one's about reexamining your relationship. Heaven Is Whenever-- the Christian version of reward, the ultimate reward of heaven. I guess what I'm trying to say is this is happening every day. We're blessed always. There is struggle and there is suffering in our lives, but understanding that is part of our lives-- a part that just is. Suffering is a part of the joy of life.

Pitchfork: If it's about struggle and reward, then where does something like the Youth of Today story on "Barely Breathing" fit into that?

CF: I did see those shows. Ray Cappo never tried to convert me into a Krishna, although one of his cohorts probably did. I think it was just about being wrapped up in this thing. Hardcore, at one point, meant everything to me. Now you look back, and I still think it's cool, but to some extent I grew out of it. Other things became a bigger priority for me. That chorus ends up with, "Nobody wins at violent shows." That's coming from the same thing. It's hard for me to imagine a show that you need to have a fight at, or anyone in the mindset of, "Wow, I'm fighting at a show." Or a show that you'd go to, a hardcore show, where there's six different fights. Things are out of perspective at that point.

Pitchfork: You worked with Dean Baltulonis on this one. He produced the first couple of records, which don't really sound anything like this one. Do you see any commonality between this one and the first two albums?

CF: Yeah, although I don't know that it's on a studio level. The first two records were really written as a four-piece, and then Franz [Nicolay] joined in right before Separation Sunday. He played piano, but he was kind of playing over the songs we already wrote. And this one was really written for a four-piece. There's space, and the songs breathe. We resisted the urge to fill every nook and cranny, which makes the songs less frantic and-- I think-- better. It doesn't really sound like Separation Sunday, but that's more of a statement of how many hundreds of shows we've played between Sep Sunday and today, how that's changed us as people and as musicians and as a band.

Pitchfork: It's the longest time you've taken between albums. Even though it's only a couple of years, it seems like it's been a while since Stay Positive came out.

CF: It's getting toward two years, and generally we've done one about every 15 months. But we did a longer promo push for Stay Positive-- especially in the UK. We spent a lot of time touring and capitalizing on a growing audience over there.

We took a long time making this record. John Agnello produced the last two, Boys and Girls and Stay Positive, and we were really happy with it. But at the same time, it was like, "Well, do we just go and do that again? No, let's go back to Dean and do it a little different. Let's just start recording." And at some point, we were like, "Wow, we have a lot of good songs. Let's make a record. Let's wrap this up and deliver it."

When we started the band, I was really like, "We just want to make a lot of records"-- not quite unlike Guided By Voices' schedule. I've always thought that our live thing is what we do best, and having a really robust, big catalog makes for the most interesting live band-- especially with people, at this point, traveling to see us night after night. For us to have almost 100 songs to pull from is a really cool thing. The sets can be different. They can be invigorating on an intellectual level. I definitely hope to continue to release records at an accelerated pace.

Pitchfork: It's always been pretty amazing that you've been able to just crank out albums while maintaining this intense touring schedule.

CF: It's like what I was saying about the record. If we enjoy what we're doing, we shouldn't really need a break. It's fun for us to play music. It's our livelihood, but I don't look at it as a job. It doesn't seem to me to be a problem to constantly be doing this. And also, the more you release records, in some ways it takes pressure off you. If you wait four or five years between records, it better be a masterpiece, you know? And if you keep putting them out, you're saying, "Hey, here's 10 more songs we wrote. Wanna hear 'em?"

Pitchfork: You mentioned the UK. Are you bigger over there than you are here?

CF: I think proportionally, yeah. That the biggest headlining club show we've ever done was in London. That was like 3,000 people at the Roundhouse. I mean, it's comparable. We never went there before Boys and Girls in America, and it just seems like it's caught up really quickly. Proportionally, if you look at the numbers, we're selling maybe a third of the total record sales in England. Maybe a quarter. So, that's pretty big.

Pitchfork: But you're such an American band.

CF: Well, I think so too. There's somewhat of a real fascination with American bands and American mythology in London, so I think we've tapped into some of that. Maybe because of the way the press works or whatever, they have extremely knowledgeable music fans over there. People who will sit there and talk to you about some record that came out in 1967 out of Memphis that you've never heard before.

Pitchfork: You're on the Titus Andronicus album, The Monitor. There's an eMusic interview with Titus frontman Patrick Stickles where he basically says that that album is his band's attempt to make Separation Sunday, or something comparable. What do you think of that?

CF: They're my favorite young band, and I think that Patrick himself is an incredibly intelligent and energetic person. I was proud to be asked to do it. I think that's maybe how he experienced it. If that is, it's mainly just because it's a cohesive narrative throughout an album. When you think about what an album means to a 24-year-old like him, you also have to contextualize it with that. An album doesn't mean as much to a lot of people now, compared to just songs. So I'm flattered in that way, and I really love that band. I think they're really exciting, and I think they do all the right things. They have the exact right amount of punk rock and fist-pumping along with a lot of intelligence and emotion. So it's an exciting time to be around them. A lot of things are happening for them.

Pitchfork: It's also it's cool to me that you have been around as the Hold Steady long enough that you can be an influence.

CF: Yeah, well that's the thing. When I was down at SXSW, I saw Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers. And I was talking with him: "Man, we're putting out our fifth record. It's weird to think you're pretty established a little bit." You know? Even at 35, I felt like the Hold Steady were up-and-comers. Now I feel like, "Wow, people are naming us as an influence. That's very cool." But it's a little different mindset.

Pitchfork: With the album done, how are you feeling about it?

Tad Kubler: I don't want to say that this is our best record or anything like that because I don't want to diminish any of the albums we've done before. But I feel like we made a good album. There's a lot of music that's about to come out. I was talking to Carl [Newman] from New Pornographers, and Broken Social Scene's got a new record coming out. There's so much music that's coming out in the next few weeks, and I'm just really proud that we're in that collective of people making music. So I feel like we've made a good record. I hope people enjoy it.

Pitchfork: It's definitely a really big-sounding record, and it's kind of funny. Every album, you guys have made something sonically bigger in scope than what came before. You did it again this time.

TK: The two records we made with John [Agnello], we made some deliberate decisions. One thing I wanted to do was keep it very traditional in terms of production-- everything from the tape we used to the studio we recorded in, keeping everything analog. The mic placement and all these things that we did. But I really wanted this record to sound a little more contemporary. I think that's what people are hearing when they think this album is a little more produced or a little more slick.

Pitchfork: How do you mean "contemporary"?

TK: I didn't get caught up in being concerned about keeping clear of anything but analog gear. We recorded in Pro Tools, and we used the studio more as a tool than simply a conduit to record music. I guess I wanted it to sound less traditional or vintage. I didn't get hung up about the warmth of the tape or the tube mics or anything. In fact, a lot of times, I was like, "Fuck it, man, let's just throw a mic up in the room and record something." I concentrated more on what we were trying to capture as opposed to how we were capturing it.

Pitchfork: It seems like you've scaled back the guitar heroics on this one. There are fewer solos and fewer big moments for you on this album.

TK: Actually, there was a big guitar solo in "We Can Get Together", and we still do it live, but I ended up taking it out of that song. I felt like the recorded version, there was this really beautiful texturing with the guitar tracks and the piano and the vocals at the end, and I thought the solo seemed a little gratuitous. I've heard people say it's a bigger guitar record, which is funny because I ended up playing a lot of piano on this record, and I ended up writing a lot on piano. How it became a bigger guitar record I'm not really sure. Essentially, we're a guitar band. I think our previous two records the piano is mixed a little loudly, so maybe that's why people got a little confused about that.

Pitchfork: When you say you played a lot of piano and wrote on piano, did you write without Franz?

TK: Franz? Yeah, Franz isn't on the record. He wasn't involved with the record. He generally isn't. I've been the main songwriter for a while.

Pitchfork: Would you say, then, that Franz not being involved didn't make that big of an impact on the recording of the album?

TK: Yeah, that's probably correct.

Pitchfork: You've got Dean Baltulonis producing this, and he did the first two albums, but the sound of this one seems miles removed from the first two. Listening back, those are so much more kind of jagged than this one. How did you decide to go with him again?

TK: I was working on scoring stuff in January 2009, and he and I own a studio together. That was when I [decided] how I wanted to approach this songwriting. We started to do demos. I recorded "A Slight Discomfort" and "A Sweet Part of the City" in January 2009 and then showed those to the guys. Those songs ended up bookending the record. They're a little bit different from what we've done before, dynamically. And that was the impetus for this record-- trying new things.__
__Pitchfork: Is that a clarinet solo on "Barely Breathing"?

TK: It is. I really wanted a clarinet solo on "Cattle and the Creeping Things" on our second record, and it never happened for various reasons. So when I called Peter Hess to come in and do horns on a couple of songs, "Barely Breathing" being one of them, I said, "Do you have a clarinet?" And he said, "I do." And I said, "Bring it, because I have an idea." I think the feel and the tempo of the song lends itself to that Dixieland-style solo. It makes it exciting and interesting for us to try new things. It's always going to be a Hold Steady album, but if we go in with the intention of trying to do things differently, and to grow as a band, it's going to keep us happy and interested.

Pitchfork: It's interesting to me when the first records came out, it was like, "Oh, it's the Lifter Puller guys doing their take on classic arena rock," and now you're actually playing much bigger venues, sometimes festivals or opening for the Dave Matthews Band or whatever. When you do these newer songs, do you think about how they're going to sound in these bigger spaces?

TK: First of all, we're essentially playing rock music. I've always said we're a rock band. We're playing the music, essentially, that I grew up with. It's how I learned to play guitar-- sitting with Led Zeppelin and Cheap Trick records, backing the needle up and learning how to play along. When the band started, by doing something that was very obvious to us and sort of traditional, it set us apart at the time from what was happening musically.

I still find that funny and interesting. We don't think about how the songs are going to translate so much during the writing process. Once the song is recorded, and once we're mixing, that's when it occurs to me. Then you start rehearsing to play shows. I never concern myself about how we're going to pull it off live, because I know we'll figure out a way to do it. As long as the six of us get up onstage and have at it, that's what a rock concert is. The rest will work itself out.

I remember soundchecking at the Manchester Evening News Arena-- that's like a 20,000 capacity arena. I thought, "Man, this sounds right. This is how this should sound all the time." And that was a really awesome experience, growing up and going to rock concerts that were in arenas. So that was fun. That's what's nice about playing festivals, too. You're on this huge, enormous stage and you've got 200,000 watts of power blowing your guitars all over the place. It sounds good.

Pitchfork: Over the years, it's been a lot of fun watching you add little tricks and ideas and stuff to your stage show. You started out doing the thing where you throw your guitar over your shoulder and then it comes back again, or you started bringing out the doubleneck guitar. Where do you go from there? Do you have any more new things that you're pulling out?

TK: You know, the next step is probably fire, isn't it?

Pitchfork: I think it has to be.

TK: That may be a little bit harder to run by the guys. The doubleneck was already a problem.

Pitchfork: How was it a problem?

TK: As a guitar player, I've got a shit ton of stuff I take out on tour, from my guitar collections to amps. So it's always like, "Do you really need all this shit, man?" And it's like, "I'm a guitar player in a rock band. What does 'need' have to do with it?" But to be honest, the next thing was the addition of Steve to the band. I've really thought we needed a second guitarist for a long time, and Steve was somebody we met on one of our first tours. He's from Memphis, and he was playing in the Bloodthirsty Lovers. We were up late bonding over Led Zeppelin records. We kept in touch, and when I finally convinced everybody that we needed to get a new guitar player, Steve was the first person I called.

Pitchfork: Does that free you up to do more on stage?

TK: Yeah, definitely. Also, Steve is such a phenomenal guitar player that it's nice to get up onstage with somebody of that caliber. It forces me to play my ass off every night; otherwise he's going to wipe the floor with my ass.

Pitchfork: When you grew up going to arena rock shows, who were some of the guitarists who had an impact on you?

TK: Rick Nielsen, Angus Young. Huge Eddie Van Halen fan when I was younger. Jimmy Page is an enormous one. When you grow up with classic rock like that and then you get into punk rock, you defy your roots and where you came from. I never really went through that. Even when I started listening to the Clash or the Sex Pistols, I still always listened to Led Zeppelin or Kiss. I guess my guitar heroes shifted from people like Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix to people like Johnny Marr or John Squire.

TK: That's absolutely it. Yes. That solo-- in terms of notes it isn't anything like it, but in terms of aesthetic, it's direct rip-off from the "November Rain" solo. In fact, when I did it, I imagined myself walking out of a church, walking out onto a cliff and doing a guitar solo. Slash has always been one of my favorites because the guy uses a lot of melody in his solos. It's not just a quick run of notes with technical prowess. He can take three notes and make a beautiful solo. And that's one thing I've always really admired about his guitar playing. I'm a huge Slash fan all around.

Pitchfork: This might be a sore subject, but when Franz left the band, he gave an interview where he said that you guys have your one big idea that you do well. Speaking just as a fan of the band, it seemed like a major dick move. Did that also sit badly with you guys?

TK: The only thing I can say-- knowing Franz, I don't think that he meant it to be like that. I don't know. I mean, I'm incredibly pleased with our new record, and I think it definitely illustrates how we've grown as songwriters and how we've grown as a band. That sort of speaks to what Franz was saying. So, you know, whatever, man.

How do I say this without sounding like a real dick? With the way media works now and the outlets people have with websites and blogs and message boards and Twitter and all this crazy shit, everybody has a voice. We probably agree particularly that that's not always the best thing. Being able to differentiate from a legitimate source and an objective opinion, as opposed to somebody shooting their mouth off under a pseudonym somewhere... if you start to look for stuff like that, you're going to drive yourself totally fuckin' nuts.

I'm kind of going off on a tangent here a little bit. But if I start to go around and look for stuff that's being written about me or about the band, chances are I'm not going to find what I'm looking for or what I'd want to be hearing. If I go out and look for it and it's out there, I'm really going to notice when it's not. And I'd hate to think that that would impact any decisions I'm making. One thing I've always been really proud of about our band is that we've done what we wanted to do, what we enjoy doing, and we've been really lucky that people have responded to it the way that they have. As long as we continue to really enjoy what we do and make decisions with integrity, I'm hoping people continue to respond to that.